Sacrifice

They used to walk, her small feet following his, along the narrow forest paths filled with rotting leaves after he picked her up from school. The scent of green enveloping and pushing inside her thin, short hair. Whisper of their voices raising when they excitedly talked above each other.

He talked to her about the vicissitudes of philosophy and the underlying spirituality in all that eyes could and could not see. He talked about the Vedas, Bhagvath Geetha and liked pleasing her with subtle facts that proved him right. His beard would take up a pleasant curve then just a tad.

saha-yajnah prajah srstva
purovaca prajapatih
anena prasavisyadhvam
esa vo ‘stv ista-kama-dhuk

May you evolve and prosper by sacrifice.

The girl though, talked to him about colours of her world. Yellow she witnessed that day at sunrise, red that the smell borrowed when her mother’s ladle gently summoned it from the depths of a curry pot and indigo that sometimes seeped into her heart and stained her days with sorrow.

******

She looked at the green hues of a broken glass piece she had picked up from the scene of her mother’s accident days ago, when her father’s voice thundered down the hall. It came in spurts of anger and slurred down as his foggy brain gripped unsuccessfully on a vanishing consciousness. She waited for the footfall to grow silent and the only colour she could see, was black.